Tom Guarriello explains why meeting Nelson Mandela moves people to tears: Mandela embodies what Heidegger called "Resolute Dasein," a mode of authentic existence that confronts others with their own inauthenticity. It's not celebrity that causes the reaction, but witnessing a life lived with uncompromising authenticity.
Hey guys, it's Tom here in gorgeous San Francisco today after coming back from the TED conference. Let me, uh, I got a lot of things I would love to blog about, vlog about today, but the thing I have to do is to make a response to Kayev. Kayev, maximum respect, my friend. Your question, your video, "Why do people cry when they meet Nelson Mandela?" Man, you really hit the nail on the head. Let me give you a my, my, my thoughts about why that happens. When I was studying psychology in graduate school, the graduate school I went to, we read a lot of philosophy, and a lot of the philosophy we read was the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Martin Heidegger was a lot of things, but one of the things Martin Heidegger did was to write about human existence in ways that nobody else, in my experience, has ever written about human existence existence before, and Heidegger has a phrase in his arguably magnum opus, Being and Time, in which he writes, "Resolute Dasein is the conscience of Dasein." Now, what the hell does that mean? Well, first of all, when Heidegger uses the word Dasein, he's trying to talk about human existence in its essence, in its most characteristic form. And in that phrase, "Resolute Dasein is the conscience of Dasein," what he means, what he meant, was that when we are in the presence of a human being whose existence has been lived resolutely— now, he used that word very carefully, as he used all of his words very carefully— to indicate a person whose life was, for want of a better word, authentic, lived with deep, authentic resolve. And what he meant by resolute Dasein as the conscience of Dasein is that most of us in our everyday lives don't necessarily live our lives with complete authenticity. We fudge it. We sort of, you know, kind of maybe a little bit, but resolute Dasein does not. The resolute human being, the human being living human existence in a resolute fashion, does not fudge it. That person is not, in Heidegger's words, fallen, meaning someone who is kind of going along with the crowd and kind of doing things, you know, just to kind of get along, going along to get along. You know that phrase, going along to get along? Not resolute Dasein. Resolute Dasein does not go along to get along. Resolute Dasein lives authentically. Now, when we're in the presence of someone like that— Nelson Mandela, I think, being a marvelous example— we are called to our own authenticity and to our own failings. You put it really well when you read, you know, wanting to be like him on my best day. I think all of us are when we are in the presence of someone who has lived this life, this kind of resolute life, we're suddenly thrown face-to-face with our own existence and the possibilities of our own existence, which is always to live authentically the way Resolute Dasein does, the way the resolute human being does. It's not just celebrity, it's not just fame, it's more than that. We've all been in the presence of famous people who don't make us cry. But someone who has lived in that resolute fashion, the way Nelson Mandela has, hits us in a place that's very deep and very profound and calls us to ourselves, calls us to be ourselves in a very special way. So thanks for that video, Kaiv. That was great. And maximum respect, my friend. Take care. Bye-bye.
